Fellowships in Sustainability Science Honor Giorgio Ruffolo, Italy’s Founding Minister of the Environment: Fellowships to support graduate and post-doctoral students and practitioners

Cambridge, MA – In a ceremony today at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Academic Dean Mary Jo Bane announced the establishment of The Giorgio Ruffolo Fellowships in Sustainability Science and introduced the first Ruffolo Fellows to the Harvard community.  These fellowships honor the legacy of Giorgio Ruffolo, Italy’s first Minister of the Environment (1987-92), who worked to build Italian and European Union environmental programs and, through his charismatic leadership, encouraged many young Italians to pursue environmental careers. 

“The Kennedy School and Harvard are thrilled to welcome such a diverse and distinguished group of researchers and students as Ruffolo Fellows.  I am confident that their work mobilizing science to inform solutions for sustainability challenges in agriculture, biodiversity, cities, energy and materials, health and water will produce tremendous benefits to citizens around the world and do much to link knowledge with action in the critical area of sustainable development,” commented Bane.

The Ruffolo Fellowships will strengthen international networks and capacity in the field of sustainability science, the emerging field of use-inspired research encompassing studies of the interactions between human and environmental systems.  The Fellowships will enable doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers, and senior leaders in governmental, non-governmental or private organizations to spend time as Visiting Fellows at the Center for International Development (CID).  They will also support the participation of Italians who have practical experience working on international environment and development policy issues in the Kennedy School’s masters’ degree programs.

The first group of Ruffolo Fellows includes two students in the Master in Public Administration/International Development (MPA/ID) and Master of Public Administration/Mid-Career programs (MPA/MC), six doctoral students, two post-doctoral researchers, and four senior practitioner fellows.  Projects currently being pursued by the Ruffolo Fellows include technology incubators to promote decentralized production of biofuels, forest policy reforms in developing countries, community management of water infrastructure, development of evaluation metrics and decision-support tools, green chemistry, and the political ecology of violent conflict.  Fellows come from Italy, Sweden, South Africa, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya and the United States.  They are an interdisciplinary group with varied backgrounds that include public policy, economics, environmental sciences, management, engineering, political science and philosophy.

The Ruffolo Fellowships are a critical component of a large gift provided by the Italian Ministry for the Environment, Land, and Sea announced earlier this year to create a Fund for Sustainable Development at Harvard.  The Fund is supporting projects that seek to foster shared prosperity and reduce poverty while protecting the environment.  William Clark, Harvey Brooks professor of international science, public policy, and human development and co-director of the Sustainability Science Program, thanked Director General Corrado Clini and commented, “The Ruffolo Fellows are the heart of our growing program in sustainability science.  Mentored by faculty from across the university, they are fostering interfaculty linkages within Harvard even as they connect our campus with a world-wide network of scholars and practitioners tackling the challenges of sustainable development.”

“The challenge of sustainable development requires increased social capacity to understand and to govern the complex relationships between economic development and environmental quality. The Italian Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea and the Sustainability Science Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University are working together to educate tomorrow’s leaders from around the world in the research and management skills needed to make sustainable development a reality,” said Corrado Clini, director general of the Italian Ministry for the Environment and senior research fellow at CID.

“The innovative potential of sustainability science consists in changing the framework of the research, by enhancing it from a narrow vision of the economy to a wider panorama that includes nature and philosophy. The real sense of the new science is not to discover a model of relationship between nature and society, but to build an entire new model aimed at physical equilibrium and spiritual enrichment,” stated Hon. Giorgio Ruffolo, former Italian Minister for Environment.

“The Ruffolo Fellows join a distinguished international cadre of students in fellowship programs from around the world funded by thoughtful governments and philanthropists, including the McCloy Fellows from Germany, Kennedy Fellows from the United Kingdom, Kokkalis Fellows from Southeastern and East-Central Europe, Wexner Fellows from Israel, and Kistefos Fellows from Norway.  The Kennedy School is the most international school at Harvard and this diversity of national experience is a critical factor in the education of all our students,” Bane remarked.

The Sustainability Science Program at Harvard’s Center for International Development seeks to advance basic understanding of the dynamics of human-environment systems; to facilitate the design, implementation, and evaluation of practical interventions that promote sustainability in particular places and contexts; and to improve linkages between relevant research and innovation communities on the one hand, and relevant policy and management communities on the other.

More information on the Sustainability Science Program and the conference at which today’s announcement was made can be found at http://www.cid.harvard.edu/sustsci/events/conferences/20070921.html

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